Looking at Cartoons, Getting Along

Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."

मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, April 28, 2022

अपराध....Indian Noir...When Dreamers Become Schemers

Laura Lippman:
"My definition of noir has long been: Dreamers become schemers."

सीमा देव, अपराध, १९६९

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

विंदा विट्गेन्स्टाइनना विसरले!...Ludwig Wittgenstein@133...The Most Important Philosopher of Modern Times

विंदा करंदीकर यांच्या अष्टदर्शने, २००३ पुस्तकात Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson, Charvak आहेत पण Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Hume and George Santayana नाहीत.

Ian Ground, TLS: "...Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times."

Monday, April 25, 2022

मराठी ऐतिहासिक कादंबरीत किती घोडा आहे?....Horse and Marathi Historical Novels

Peter Frankopan: “...This region is where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. It is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa, where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in the horse markets of northern India....” (The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, २०१५)

मध्यमवर्गीय लोकांचा अलीकडे एकत्र भेटल्यावर बोलण्याचा एक आवडता विषय म्हणजे - मोटारगाड्या... (मला मोटार चालवता येत नाही आणि लहानपणापासून त्याबाबदल आवडत नाही. बसायला आवडते.)

आता कल्पना करा घोडा हा १७-२०व्या शतकात महाराष्ट्रात किती लोकप्रिय बोलण्याचा विषय असेल ते... मी २०व्या पासून लिहल्या गेलेल्या खूप मराठी ऐतिहासिक कादंबऱ्या वाचल्या नसतील, पण मी ज्या वाचल्यात, त्या कोणत्याही कादंबरीत घोड्यावरती दीर्घ, सूक्ष्म , समाधानकारक असे मला काही आढळलेले नाही ....

courtesy: Wikipedia

Saturday, April 23, 2022

World Book Day

#WorldBookDay

Artist: Unknown

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Sell Your Soul...Current Day Job Application

An FB comment on the following picture:

"This eventually evolved into the current day job application."...

courtesy: Dangerous Minds

Sunday, April 17, 2022

कोणते निर्जन बेट?....Arguing Over Island to Maroon On

आजवर किती कार्टून्स या विषयावर पहिली असतील पण हे जरा जास्तच विशेष....

“This one has nicer sand, but I think I prefer the tree on the last one we saw.”

Artist: Edward Steed, The New Yorker, March 2015

Thursday, April 14, 2022

Why Horses Deserve To Sit....

Susanna Forrest, ‘The Age of the Horse: An Equine Journey Through Human History ‘, 2016

“....For we use the horse in more ways than any other animal: we ride on its back, attach it to wagons and ploughs, strap packs to it, drink its milk, eat its meat, go to war on it, cherish it as a pet and have turned it into a symbol of everything from wealth to political power, purity, lasciviousness and human suffering. In 5,500 years of domestication, humans have transformed horses’ bodies into everything from buttons to thrones....”

Artist: Michael Maslin, The New Yorker, May 2017

Monday, April 11, 2022

Multiverse, The Existence of Goad and Copyright Violation

Alan P. Lightman, ‘The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith”, 2011:

“…It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the “multiverse.” Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, “We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.”…

…The multiverse offers an explanation to the fine-tuning conundrum that does not require the presence of a Designer. As Steven Weinberg says: “Over many centuries science has weakened the hold of religion, not by disproving the existence of God but by invalidating arguments for God based on what we observe in the natural world. The multiverse idea offers an explanation of why we find ourselves in a universe favorable to life that does not rely on the benevolence of a creator, and so if correct will leave still less support for religion.”…”

Artist: Drew Dernavich , March 2020